The best Charles Bickford’s music movies

A movie star helps a young singer/actress find fame, even as age and alcoholism send his own career into a downward spiral.

The setting is a small town in 1870s Pennsylvania. Sally Waterson and her father have stopped in town with their traveling medicine show, but when their wagon catches fire, they find themselves stranded. They're taken in by Mrs. Cortlandt and her grandson, Peter, who is trying to set up a pipeline that will supply oil throughout the state. Sally and Peter soon fall in love and marry. Neither their marriage nor Peter's pipe dreams flow too smoothly.

A reporter stumbles on a runaway heiress whose story could salvage his career.

It is California in 1852 that only recently being surrendered by Mexico to the United States and admitted into the union. Most of the land-owners of California were the descendants of the Dons who had colonized it a hundred years before and whose title deeds bore the signature and seal of a long-dead Spanish king. But, by a loop-hole in the law, the title-deeds of the Dons could not be recognized, and this opened the door of organized gangs of land-grabbers, such as the one led by Joe Kincaid, to operate with a prime excuse for legitimate plunder and robbery. In most cases the law was unable to cope with the situation. Then Rosita Castro, the daughter of Don Pasqual Castro, masked and disguised as a man, organized a band of vigilantes to fight against the tyranny of the outlaws, aided by an undercover federal agent, Jim Kearney.